Patching on a computer involves plugging something into something else virtually. In this video tutorial, you can extend that by adding a physical knob to control your custom creations, for Max/MSP (and Max for Live).

It’s just a quick tip, but I know this gets asked a lot. (Greetings, students – happy spring semester to you!) And there’s something really fun about seeing a knob in the real world controlling something. Bonus points for using a toilet paper roll as a custom “housing.”

It’s also nice seeing this accomplished in the all-new Max 7.

And this is just the start, part of a project extending beyond Max/MSP to free tools like Pure Data, JavaScript, and Python. The basic idea is a set of techniques for real-world control, backed by free code/patch examples and video tutorials. The creator explains: Continue reading »

Akai artist Needlz set up this MPC+computer rig with Renaissance … in a hotel room (to get out of the house). No, no standalone MPC hardware at the moment, but 1.8′s software features might help you forget that.

“MPC” these days is a name on a lot of Akai stuff, down to even various MIDI controllers that happen to have pads. But to die-hard MPC users, “MPC” means a way of working. So, workflow is vitally important.

And MPC users who cut their teeth on Akai’s dedicated hardware have been waiting to see the software/controller combination really come into its own. Native Instruments’ rival Maschine got to the software game first, but now it’s a question of how the MPC can again set itself apart.

That makes any software updates a big deal. You’d be forgiven for assuming that something called “1.8″ wasn’t terribly big news. But you’d be wrong – and that’s a good thing, too.

The 1.8 update released today actually does quite a lot. And so the folks working on that software got in touch with CDM to tell us more about it, in some detail. (Trivia: Akai’s Pete Goodliffe was responsible years ago for the early iOS MIDI library PGMidi. This is a very small world, indeed, when it comes to MIDI engineering.)

Now we’re talking. Sure, that pad perform mode looks familiar with NI’s Maschine and Komplete Kontrol and Ableton’s Push offering something similar. But the implementation here is worth examining, and really focusing on actual sampling, chopping, and looping is something that could make those other tools jealous again.

For an overview, let’s first revisit the preview video from December, which Akai tell us “holds up pretty well” in terms of final shipping functionality:

Music software can treat devices as melodic instruments, as percussion, as audio effects… so why not visuals, too? Of course, there’s no substitute for a dedicated visual artist / VJ in a set, but Brainwash HD at least gives you the tools to integrate performance visuals as an element of a set in Ableton Live. It’s the visual equivalent of the sound modules we’ve been looking at lately.

And Brainwash is just one of a number of clever little Max for Live modules from Isotonik Studios, as seen in the video at top. CDM has gotten an exclusive first look at what they’ve been building.

Before we get to those acid-watched visuals, this showcase also shows Max for Live tools you might use for any number of tasks. Follow and Return allow you to trigger actions based on clips. Follow expands on the built-in Follow Actions in Live by setting up any action you want when a clip finishes playing. I’ve long felt that Follow Actions were needlessly neglected by Ableton since their introduction; I’d still love to see more internal, integrated behavior, but for making your own custom performance rigs, this looks terrific.

And yes, this performs something Live itself ought to do, but doesn’t – it lets you set Scenes as Follow Actions. Continue reading »

The harp: it’s big. It’s temperamental. It’s pretty much associated with an established set of music. And when you hear “MIDI harp,” you’re typically in store for something kind of cheesy involving laser beams.

Not this time, though: this is an actual harp, augmented with MIDI into a pretty wacky one-off one-person instrument.

Time for Throwback Thursday, because I hadn’t seen this before even though it’s rather old. But, maybe unearthing it in this fashion will inspire Arnaud Roy to make something new (or share what he’s been up to lately).

The project is the “HarpJamX” – a conventional acoustic harp with MIDI augmentation. What are we seeing?

This video shows one of the greatest feature of the CAMAC MIDI Harp. When bending on a string, for example with a tuning key, the harp sends a “pitch bend” message. This is because the Midi conversion uses frequency analysis.

Ah, interesting. So you aren’t just using MIDI as a trigger – you’re actually triggering control information via continuous pitch. One common misunderstanding of MIDI is the assumption that it can only handle note relationships found on a keyboard. This simply isn’t true; it’s actually that keyboards assume 12-tone-equal tempered pitch relations, and us being Western musicians and keyboards being easy things to play, they make for good demonstration. But this should indicate that you can treat pitch continuously, both using pitch bend and (if you were to choose to do so) by remapping the tuning of MIDI’s integer note representations, as well.

Got all that? MIDI is more than just white- and black-note keys, to say it more directly.

Here’s another take on musical harps, this time featured in the fall by Motherboard and making use of magnets and a piano. Watch:

I had the craziest dream. Super vivid, and it just kept going. Seriously, like it seemed to last a decade. Instead of playing electronic music live on gear that made sounds, so you could keep track of what you were doing with physical buttons and switches and things, all the boys and girls were using laptops. But that wasn’t the weird part: what was strange was, people were just putting whole tracks on those computers. I know what you’re thinking – so they were DJing, right? But no! They were just playing tracks one after another all the same tempo. Sometimes they used, like, the computer keyboard. You couldn’t even see two tracks playing at once — like, you just had to stare at the screen to see when they were nearly done and then make them play one at a time. And then people were adding loops over top that never stopped, so everything sounded like a trainwreck. It was kind of a nightmare.

Anyway, I woke up with night terrors, but then I saw Ceephax Acid Crew in a big cube of video game graphics and I knew everything was okay again. Ha – like, why would you buy an expensive computer that does all these cool things if you’re just going to play it like a single CDJ with no crossfader?! Too funny.

Now I see Ceephax Acid Crew and I’m awake and it’s not a dream.

URSS got a camera, and now you have Ceephax Acid Crew playing in your computer from the Internet, and that proves it’s real. “Live motherf***in’ acid,” says some man.

Source/location:
La Fabrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy
31 January 2015

Milan’s Intellighenzia is a brilliant host for independent electronic music culture; find more:

Racks and knob-encrusted modules and wires tangling together to make sound – this is a perfectly lovely thing. But the computer sitting in front of you, the one you probably turn to when it comes time to record and produce, is also capable of vast sonic powers. Why force a choice between the two, when that machine can let you explore the frontiers of sound, too?

The recent announcement of OSCiLLOT brought open-ended patching to Ableton Live users. But it’s only getting started. Today, we get to see it evolve, learn to use it to make the sounds we imagine, find out about the development process, and better understand why it matters.

And now is the perfect time, because OSCiLLOT’s creators have been busy beefing up the system they just unveiled. For starters, there’s a new tutorial video to teach you how to use it (top). And, you get two new modules: a comb filter, plus a terrific feedback module that lets you route sound back into your modular rig. (I’m especially pleased about that, as I was getting muddled coming from Pure Data/Pd, in which feedback loop routing works differently. Well, and because generally feedback is great fun.)

OSCiLLOT versus Max 7. First off, let’s clear up some confusion. Cycling ’74′s Max/MSP recently brought its own modular environment to the table, by bundling Max 7 with stretta’s modular patch library BEAP – the feature I called one of the best reasons to upgrade to Max 7. And so some readers assumed that this means OSCiLLOT is redundant. It’s not. If you’re using Max directly for patching, BEAP is still a great environment – one that can help you learn modular synthesis techniques, make some great sonic creations, and connect to outboard gear.

But OSCiLLOT isn’t BEAP. BEAP is a great learning tool, but it’s not so great when it comes to using Max inside Ableton Live. BEAP is monophonic, for one thing; OSCiLLOT gives you polyphony, which makes more sense on a computer. And – here’s the deal-killer – you can’t patch BEAP live when you’re working with Ableton Live. (You have to enter edit mode – and at that point, you’ve lost a true modular feel.)

Hypnotic repetitive gestures are perhaps the signature of our generation in music, the legacy of Reich and Glass and Monk and Riley and Young … and tape decks and computers and drum machines. But then, repetition is the very stuff of our bodies, of heartbeats and footsteps and brain waves. Mastering repetition is essential, then, to any compositional practice. It should be, literally, as natural as breathing in and breathing out. And it should have the potential to take on its own voice.

That’s the sense I get of this work. Listening to Hanno Leichtmann’s music, you may drift off into another world. It is work of collage, but in a way that imagines a new landscape. In ‘Minimal Studies,’ released on Moscow’s mikroton Records in 2013 and in live form this week, that effect is especially in evidence.

Hanno is no stranger to club music as well as experimental; he’s a DJ, often favoring the dubby, as well as curator. And his aesthetic is partly visual, staging festivals that reinterpret typography and letraset in music and creating his own visual objects, including optical picture disk releases. In Minimal Studies, he finds a way to take the gesture of a loop and hone in on it in some unique and transcendent way. The reference to minimalism is clear, but the color, the effect are Hanno’s.